True love.

And people near the waterway said they heard her say, "I'll never leave you again big boy!"

He has never had an affair, and never has forced himself upon her. He even provides shade when it's hot.

 

A few months after I first got Dingo, I was walking her around at an annual swap meet at the Lions Club. All of a sudden, she stiffened up and the hair raised down her back. She found a small children's rocking horse and she thought it was another dog. It was just a little bit larger than she was, and it took a couple of minutes of sniffing and poking at the rocking horse with her nose before she finally decided it wasn't going to move.

We were cracking up during this, and I would have bought it, but they wanted $75 for it, a little too much for a dog toy.

 

Flanders & Swan had a song about an armadillo in love with a tank. Probably not based on a true story. Quite a nice song, but sad.

"... O my darling armadillo, how delightful it would be
if for us those silver wedding bells would chime.
Underneath this weeping willow, you need only say 'I will.' O
be my darling armadillo all the time..."

 

Very neat and amusing story - thanks for sharing.

I used to live down the street from a small lake that was designated a bird sanctuary. There were all kinds of ducks, geese, and swans there. I was fascinated by the way they interacted with each other. Swans, for instance, mate for life - I didn't know that before I lived there. They acted just like married couples, too. The boy swan would pick berries off of a bush and throw them out behind him and his mate would scoop them up and take them over to their swan home. Also, there are few things meaner than daddy swan if you happen to get too close to his and mama swan's nest. My mom and I were down there one day and decided to sit down in a shady spot on the grass. We didn't realize there was a swan nest on the other side of the hedge we were next to. All of the sudden, this big, hissing male swan came over to my mom and started smacking her (hard) with his wing. He was shooing the humans away. Ducks are clique-ish, hanging out with their same duck "friends" day in and day out. There were these three lady ducks that were always together. I saw them every day - either swimming together, eating together, or waddling together. They were girlfriends!

 

Did you ever see the story about the cat and crow who were best friends? Here's the link to that - it is delightful and a true story:

 

Cat and crow: Nice story. However, nobody should be all that surprised. Animals are not automatons. Learning can overcome instinct. Hell, it's even possible that humans could learn to get along, if we'd just stop acting like such idiots.

 

Indeed! So many people see the human race as superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. We certainly have our strengths, but unlike nearly all other species on earth, we do not live in harmony with our world or with the other inhabitants of it.

Did you ever read about the tsunami in the context of the animals? It was fascinating. So many people were killed, but you could count the animals that died on one hand. In fact, an elephant trainer described what happened just before the tsunami. He said that he and his two elephants, who had always been very mild mannered, were doing their jobs giving rides to people in a zoo park. Just before the tsunami, the elephants started freaking out, jumping up on two legs, and screaming out, obviously quite upset. They yanked on their chains until they broke free of them by unearthing them. To the horror of their terrified passengers, the elephants took off, galloping as fast as they could, to higher ground. Nearly everyone in the zoo park was killed. The elephant trainer and the others who were riding on the elephants all survived and watched the catastrophic disaster take place below them.

 

I am very skeptical of this story. It sounds to me like an urban legend. I seem to remember hearing that very large numbers of animals were killed. Animals are not telepathic. But this is the kind of story that a microscopic percentage of survivors are bound to invent.

 

I can understand your skepticism. I was skeptical when I saw the elephant trainer, too, but also intrigued (I like that kind of story). However, I have a subscription to National Geographic and I read about the lack of animal deaths from the tsunami in one of the issues. I saw the interview of the elephant trainer on the tube and he had the elephants with the broken chains on their legs. That could have been sensationalized - you know how they can do that on the tube.

This article I found online from National Geographic discusses domestic and wild animal behavior noted in the days before the Tsunami. It is a very interesting article:
Did Animals Sense Tsunami Was Coming?

A couple more that discuss the Tsunami how few resulting animal deaths there were:
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Did animals have quake warning?
Best Friends Animal Society - Best Friends Tsunami Animal Relief Fund

This one talks about scientific conclusions regarding animal behavior before disasters:
Animals' alleged sensitivity to signs of catastrophe probed by scientists

You may not be in the mood or have the time or interest to read them, but I personlly like to read this kind of stuff because I find it fascinating - nature trumping technology. As smart as we think we are and in consideration of all of the truly remarkable discoveries, inventions, and technology humans have made and/or created, we are still not always ahead of the game. Our amazing brains have carried us far up the evolutionary ladder, but other species have their remarkable ways of surviving, as well.

I do think there is some scientific reason, as opposed to some sixth sense, but there are so many stories out there about animals running for cover prior to disasters. On a personal level, a few years ago, a friend of mine was injured and hospitalized for several days. She was sitting in her kitchen and the water heater exploded in the laundry room (which was a few feet away, directly off of the kitchen). She was hit with flying bricks and debris, so she had a couple of broken bones and some minor burns. When I visited her in the hospital, she told me that moments before the explosion, her cat went franticallly racing to her screened kitchen door and tore open the screen to get through it. When the explosion occurred, she was actually yelling at the cat and running toward the door to stop him. The last thing she remembered was seeing her cat running across the lawn...

 

Here's another really good one (you have to scroll down to the tsunami article). It has all kinds of informative links in it:

Tsunamis and Life -- The Untold Story

Again, this stuff may not be as fascinating to you as it is to me, but I thought I would pass it along, just in case.

 

Snopes says the reports of elephants saving people were greatly exaggerated:
Urban Legends Reference Pages: Elephant Rescue During Tsunami
It doesn't say anything about animals dying or surviving during the tsunami, though. It just talks about the elephants.

 

The articles are mostly written by journalists, not scientists. Journalists are among the most unreliable sources of information in any field.

One article cited above claims that the elephants were "screaming" three hours before the earthquake, but the Snopes article says they began acting up at about the time of the earthquake. Elephants can hear much lower frequencies than we can. They might have heard the rumblings of the quake itself.

The Snopes article (the only one above that is the least bit credible) says that elephants fled when the water receded. That's an event clearly visible, and possibly audible to elephants. The article says they have a very sensitive sense of smell. The exposed ocean floor as the water receded would have had a distinctive smell.

The water heater that exploded probably gave off a shrill hiss from excess pressure before exploding, frightening the cat.

To attribute magical premonitory abilities to animals is as absurd as any other religious claptrap. Many animals, however, have more sensitive hearing and smell than we do.

 

I fell in love with a boat once. I completely understand.

 

Dogs and cats have a sense of smell so far advanced compared to humans that they probably perceive the world much differently than humans do. I have some books by Stanley Cohen and others that claim that dogs have a much larger portion of their brain devoted to processing scents than humans do.

Humans have more of their brain devoted to processing visual information.

Cats have a even keener sense of smell than dogs do.

 

Which was my point. Their stronger senses of smell and/or hearing or perhaps an ability to sense seismic changes by sensing vibrations have been key and their survival, as our larger brain has been key to ours. I agree - not magical or some "sixth sense." I believe there are scientific explanations, like hearing, smell, sensing vibrations, etc. Water heater was probably the noise or perhaps even something the cat smelled prior to the explosion. My point was that my friend, with her big human brain, never saw it coming. Her cat did, for reasons not entirely known, which I never attributed to "magic." I was amazed by the cat's ability to see it coming and get out of danger, as I was to read about the animal movements and behaviors prior to the tsunami. My friend and I talked about her cat many times, debating the whole science vs. premonition issue. As usual, my faith was in science, but to this day, she thinks her cat has a magic gift. I'll tell you one thing, if the cat ever takes off running like that again, my friend will be close behind!

In the years I have been subscribing to National Geographic, I have found the publication to be quite credible. I believe it is one of the last bastions of good journalism and reporting, and the photography is awe inspiring.

 

Definitely true.

True again.

I doubt this. But cats have the good sense to wash themselves.

I guess my point was that although many animals have better smell and hearing than we do (and some birds have better eyesight) not all reports of surprising animal behavior are true. Such reports should be examined skeptically as humans have a great love of invention and will make up stories.

 

Indeed.